Perfectly Normal Blag

Still no iEye.
Still not finished with Rye.
Still no recent updates here.
Still no switching between PulseAudio and SPDIF in my TV-script, so mplayer still requires exclusive access to the audio.
Still no proper /home in SVN (or Git).
Still no regular exercise.

I feel like there’s so much I have planned to do, but that I just can’t get around to doing. No matter what. These things have been on my list for ages, and I want to get it done soon.

But instead, I waste time watching movies and tv-series, reading blogs, reading discussions on forums, and everything except the things I would like to get done.

All of a sudden, summer is upon us. I’m walking around nearly naked, fan on 24/7, and the door open most of the time. It’s almost unbearably hot here. The dog has moved into the basement with me, since the basement is the coolest place in the house right now.

So what do we do then? We watch The Dark Knight. Twice. It rocked! One of the best movies I’ve seen in a long time. If going to the cinema wasn’t so expensive, I might have seen it one more time already. But now I think I’ll just wait for the DVD (or Blu-Ray).

The people I was working for decided to hire me for a month, until the school starts, so then I have a full-time job to a more “normal” pay, and after that, I can work part-time helping with stuff.

Finally, been reading Getting Real, and enjoying it. Should absolutely learn something here. Just get some other things out of the way, and I’ll start on iEye, and actually making something out of it this time. As they say, ideas are worthless.

iEye: Coming soon to a desktop near you!

At least that’s what I would like to say. I’ve had it on my mind the entire day, and now I’m all ready to start working again. There’s always that slight hope that this time will be the one time I actually make it work.

I’ve been thinking a lot about it, and I think I might want to try making this version of iEye into a regular desktop application. The web-interface would still be there, but not as the only choice.

What I’m thinking about, would be similar to how Opera deals with bookmark syncronization, Opera Link. The application would run on as many machines as the user wanted, and with a single username/password (or something similar), also get access to a central server, where everything could be stored securely, for retrieval, backup and syncronization with multiple machines. Of course, for the privacy freaks, it would also be possible to run iEye without this feature.

Moving to the desktop would make a lot of things easier, such as automated fetching of covers, and integration with barcode scanners, for one thing. Additionally, it would let me have something to work on as I explore how programming for the desktop works. Which is my main goal in this planned rewrite.

iEye has served its purpose as a technology experiment pretty well. I’ve lost count of how many rewrites it has been, but there’s been a few. (Very few of them were in a working state before they were scrapped). First, in ASP, then some spaghetti-code PHP, a little cleaner object-oriented PHP, then some neat MVC PHP and lastly, Ruby on Rails (which never was finished, or anything remotely like it.)

Now I hope to use Ruby with Qt. Additionally, storage would be done using SQLite, as a database would be very well suited, and SQLite is small and lovely. Plus it doesn’t require a database server.

Finally, when all this is done and working correctly, I plan to add a web-interface to the iEyeLink-thingy, so that it can be used remotely without having to install anything as well. For that, I hope to try out Ramaze, which seems pretty interesting.

Right now I got it all in my head. Everything. Exactly how I want it to look when it’s done. I think I’ll have to try and draw some scetches. Really psyched about this now!

…and then reality, in the shape of gorken, strikes. He kindly reminded me that I don’t have time for this now. I have another project I should focus on. And at the same time, there’s also that pesky school that demands attention and work. Wish I was free.